FIG. 1 shows a typical mobile computing system platform 100. As observed in FIG. 1, the computing system platform includes an application processor 101 having a plurality of general purpose processing cores 102_1 through 102_N, a memory controller 103, a graphics processing unit 104, an I/O hub 105 and an image signal processor 106 containing a plurality of image signal processing pipelines 107_1, 107_2. The computing system platform also includes a plurality of cameras 108, 109 each having a respective image sensor 110, 111. The plurality of cameras 108, 109 typically include a front camera and a back camera.
Image data taken by an image sensor is typically provided to an image signal processing pipeline. The image signal processing pipeline then performs various computations on the image data to generate, e.g., data for display. The image signal processing pipeline is typically implemented with a pipeline (software, hardware or both) that concurrently processes different blocks of image data from the image sensor. For example, while a first block is being processed by a demosaicing stage, another block may be processed by a noise reduction stage. After an image signal processing pipeline processes data from an image sensor, the processed data may be forwarded to a display or, e.g., system memory (e.g., by way of a direct-memory-access (DMA) transfer).
Here, each image signal processing pipeline 107_1, 107_2 is dedicated to a particular camera and image sensor. That is, for example, image signal processing pipeline 107_1 is dedicated to the processing of image data generated by image sensor 110, and, image signal processing pipeline 107_2 is dedicated to the processing of image data generated by image sensor 111.